A little editing humor | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

I had to share these lessor-known editing symbols with all of my editor friends. You know you’ve thought about it.

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Redirect a YouTube video to a URL | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

In in response to a request on my other blog post, Remove the title and player controls from YouTube videos, I am posting the instructions for redirecting a YouTube video to a URL after playback. The code below is an example [...]

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Link to a page in a PDF | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

This is a short blog post because it is so easy to link to a specific page in a PDF. However, it’s not so easy if you don’t know how to do it, and the Adobe Acrobat help doesn’t address the process.

Here’s how:

At the end [...]

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Outlook & Jive SBS demo tutorials | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

These Outlook tutorials, which I have have posted on YouTube, present fundamental tasks that many of my colleagues understand. However, they are some of my most popular videos on YouTube, so I thought I would post them here.

I add new demos to the series periodically. The demo series also includes a Jive SBS tutorial. As of May [...]

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FrameMaker indexing tricks | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

Many technical writers who have been using Adobe FrameMaker for years (back when it was owned by Frame Technology and only ran on UNIX) know all of the ins and outs of the program, including how to manipulate indices to suit our needs.

However, many writers are not as familiar with the indexing features and [...]

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The etymology of Xmas | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

Xmas is a common abbreviation for Christmas. Many people consider the use of  Xmas as an attempt to “take Christ out of Christmas.” However, the etymology of Xmas tells a different story.

The mas of Xmas comes from the Old English mass,  meaning a celebration of the Eucharist. The X is derived from the Greek letter Chi,  [...]

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Where is the first page of Google? | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

If you have your own website, chances are you have been contacted by an SEO (search engine optimization) firm offering to get you on the first page of Google. For the uninitiated, this proposition sounds like a pretty good deal, but if you know anything about SEO, you know how ludicrous [...]

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Remove the title and player controls from YouTube videos | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

By adding two parameters to your YouTube embed code on your website, you can easily remove the title from the video and  auto-hide the player controls once the video begins to play. When the website visitor hovers over the video with his or her mouse, the player controls will redisplay.

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To Flash or not to Flash | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

Whether you are developing a website for an artist or a plumber, the design of the site is of utmost importance. Adobe Flash allows web designers to create stunning effects, often in specific areas of a site, and over 98% of Internet-enabled computers have Flash installed. Artists, photographers, and other businesses [...]

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26 rules for writing well (humor) | Farrell Documentation - website design & technical documentation

Don’t abbrev. Check to see if you any words out. Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct. About sentence fragments. When dangling, don’t use participles. Don’t use no double negatives. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent. Just between you and I, case is important. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. Don’t use commas, [...]

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